Snoring too loud? Blow a flute

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/04/2015 (3985 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Get ready to celebrate in a quiet manner, kids, because it’s National Stop Snoring Week.

I know this because I have just received an alarming email from the local offices of a company called RANA Respiratory Care Group, which conducts sleep studies and helps diagnose and treat people who snore or suffer from sleep apnea, which is when you stop breathing while you sleep due to the collapse of soft tissues in your upper airway.

“Forty-five per cent of adults snore,” the news release snorted. “What is more worrisome is that 75 per cent of people who snore have obstructive sleep apnea.”

The email wisely suggested National Stop Snoring Week would be the perfect time to engage in a thoughtful conversation around the importance of a good night’s sleep and eliminating snoring.

That sounds like an excellent idea to me, even though I can tell by the thoughtful and intelligent way in which you are reading this column that, like me, you definitely do not snore.

Coincidentally, I recently came up with my own two-step plan to diagnose and combat snoring, namely:

Step 1 — Get married and then, whenever your spouse thinks you are snoring, even though you do not actually snore, she will wake you up and inform you your snoring is so (bad word) loud it is causing the shingles to fall off your roof and maybe you should go sleep in the spare room.

Step 2 — If the situation persists, your spouse will implement a Snoring Elimination Program under which, every time she thinks you are snoring, she will kick you as hard as she can under the covers to convey the concept she probably should have married that nice doctor her mother introduced her to in college.

This system seems to work well in our home, which explains why, every morning, my legs are covered in bruises the size and colour of mature eggplants. I am fortunate it has not yet occurred to my wife to wear steel-toed boots to bed.

But do not get me wrong. Well-placed kicks under the covers are not the only way to get someone sleeping beside you to stop snoring. No, according to news reports I am holding in my hands, you can also stab them.

You probably think I am kidding about that option, but that is exactly what a woman on a Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago Midway Airport to Manchester, N.H., did last Thursday when she could no longer cope with the snores emanating from a man sleeping in the seat beside her.

It seems the flight was delayed a couple of hours after the irate woman used her pen to repeatedly “stab” snoring passenger Lenny Madarski, 68, when he dozed off on the runway.

“Imagine being asleep and then being stung by bees, and the waking up and going owww!” Madarski, whose shirt was streaked with ink stains, told ABC TV. “She was smirking… and all I wanted to do was not be sitting next to her.”

The stories state the battered snorer, who declined to press charges, continued on the flight, while the pen-wielding woman was removed and placed on another plane. “A passenger was removed from the flight for poking her seatmate with a pen to stop him from snoring,” is all the airline said in a statement.

So we can see snoring is definitely more hazardous to our health than we thought it was at the beginning of this column.

But here is a troubling question: What if you snore but do not have a thoughtful, caring person who is willing to kick you or, in medical emergencies, stab you with a ballpoint pen?

Based on the intensive research I have done by Googling the word “snoring,” the best option is to learn to play the flute, or possibly the tuba.

I say that because a team of researchers in India have just discovered learning to play a wind instrument, especially from the brass section, can increase the muscle tone in the upper airways and prevent snoring.

The researchers tested the lung function in 64 people who played a wind instrument and 65 who did not, and they discovered the people who played instruments such as the flute were far less likely to snore, although it was hard to tell for sure because no one was willing to sleep with them.

“Wind-instrument playing could become a cheap and non-invasive method of preventing sleep apnea in those at risk of developing the condition,” one of the study’s authors, Silas Daniel Raj, breathlessly told reporters.

Is that exciting, or what? This is a major scientific breakthrough, which I am now personally testing by playing the flute for about an hour every night when I climb into bed.

For some reason, even though I do not snore, my wife looks like she wants to kick me.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca